Please note that the view point here is of the writer and not
necessarily that of the club or it's members.

What's it worth?

What is something worth? What should something be worth? How long is a
piece of string? Three questions with no real answer, yet everyone will
try to give you one. Before we go on, let us first go back to when a piece
of equipment is new. Take the Yamaha DX7 for example, it was launched onto
the market in 1983 costing £1300 (allowing for inflation that equates
to about £2000 of todays money). The £1300 was not based solely
upon the manufacturing cost, but on recovering development costs and more
importantly here, based upon what the instrument could sell for based on
supply and demand. The DX7 was different to anything else, it's unique
sounds (everything else affordable was analogue) made it extremely
desirable. The cost of production was low, and Yamaha priced the DX7 to
sell to the mass market, in other words it was priced as high as the mass
market buying public would tolerate. When a product is more desirable than
another (or appears to be) it can command a higher price. This is the
complicated area of gauging the desirability of a product, in the case of
the DX7, Yamaha got it right, because they did sell a few! Today however,
FM synthesis and DX7's are not popular. Supply is high (there are
thousands of DX7's around) and demand is low, so the selling price is
quite low (less than 25% of it's original value). If we take a second example, say a Roland System 700 Modular synth, this
dates back 20 years and has gone through the undesirable phase and has now
re-entered the extremely desirable phase, supply and demand in this case
is perhaps the absolute extreme. There are probably only about 10 of these
instruments in the entire UK, and just about all analogue synth fans would
probably want one. Costing around £8,500 in the 1970's, allowing for
inflation that equates to over £20,000 by todays money. A System 700
will sell today for around £10,000 - £12,000, this seems a lot
of money (actually, it is a lot of money!), but compared to the inflation
indexed cost, it doesn't seem so drastic (around half it's original new
price). The problem with values, lies in the fact that things become
undesirable (not worth as much) before the desirable phase comes back
(prices rising), and it is the lower priced phase that is remembered (i.e.
how many times have you heard "I remember when you could buy a
Memorymoog for £400", you certainly could at one point, but that
value slump overshadows the fact it cost over £3300 when new - so £1500
for one is not really that high - it is still less than half it's new
price). Let us now look at what price something should be. If offered a Roland
TB303 for £700, to most this is too a high price (it's new price
about 14 years ago was £179). The point here is, if you do not buy it
at that price someone else will. This is back to the supply and demand
situation, in the case of the TB303 demand has exceeded supply, and that
makes the price go up. So, is £700 for a TB303 a rip off? The answer
to that is no. The fact you may find it difficult to except that this is
what they sell for at present is your opinion, and someone with a
different opinion will pay that price for it (I am staying neutral in this
discussion!). Demand of a product is heavily dictated by fashion and
trends, most analogue synths are fashionable nowadays and therefore
command a higher price than they did several years ago, but most
instruments sell today for less than half their original price (TB303
excepted). A few examples to illustrate this to those disbelievers out
there:-

Today's price £

Original new price £

Roland Jupiter 8

£1000-£1500

£4000

Oberheim Matrix 12

£2500-£3000

£6000

Sequential Prophet V

£800-£1200

£3200

Roland SH2

£200-£300

£550

Korg Poly 6

£250-£350

£1200

Roland Juno 60

£275-£400

£1200

Linndrum LM2

£200-£400

£2350

Roland TR808

£250-£450

£765

Roland JX3P

£250-£350

£900

Maybe it is the mainly uninteresting new instruments nowadays that has
increased the demand in the older synths, or perhaps it was the
introduction of MIDI that generated the non MIDI analogue slump (more
likely), but one thing is for sure, we are unlikely to ever see vintage
synths so low priced as we have seen them in the past.

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